No matter how many trips one has taken, or how many travel books one has read, there are always lessons to be learned on the road. I’d like to take a brief intermission from my usual narriative to share some lessons I’ve learned so far, and some stories to go with them.
Lesson 1: Swiss Chocolate melts just as easily as any other. Especially when left inside one’s backpack in direct sunlight on a hot day in Southern France. While it was certainly a new and exciting experience to eat chocolate off of my iPod, I can’t imagine that it’s good for the electronics inside.
Lesson 2: Super glue works wonders on wounded feet. After hiking the Cinque Terre coastal footpath in Italy for many kilometers in my sandals, I had quite a few blisters and cuts on my feet. The band-aids kept slipping off, and I eventually ran out. Then another backpacker showed me that you can just super-glue the wound shut! Apparently this is what they do in hospitals if the wound isn’t bad enough to warrant stitches. It worked like a charm. A short time after the wound heals, the super glue just falls off like a scab.
Lesson 3: Never take your eyes off your belongings, even in the comfort of “first class”. For the faint of heart, let me just say that this story has a happy ending. I was leaving Paris on a train with very few people. One of the perks of my EuroRail pass is that it gets me into the first class cabin on any train, so I was enjoying the un-crowdedness and large seats by putting my feet up in front of me, spreading out my books and journal on the table, with my backpack on the aisle seat next to me. I heard a voice from behind:
Overly Friendly Man: Bon voyage!
Me: Oh… er… no parle bien Frances.
Friendly: Ahh, Inglesh? Where do you go?
(I gestured to the open page in my Lonely Planet guidebook on the table in front of me)
Friendly: Ahh, Bordeaux! Very beautiful! Big cathedral, you must see!
Me: Ah, merci. Thank you. Very nice meeting you!
Friendly: You… family… France?
(Five minutes or so of broken conversation, which kept getting awkwardly extended every time I put my nose back in the book and the man kept talking to me from behind my seat. Then…)
Friendly: You… write your email?
He handed me a piece of paper and a pen. I had no idea what he would want my email address for. Did he want to send me his personal travel tips? Sell my email address to a spammer? I just wanted to end the conversation, so I turned to the table, and scribbled down one of my junk email addresses. I turned back to Friendly Man and handed him the paper.
Friendly: Merci! Bon voyage!
And with that, he turned and walked away. How strange, I thought, turning back to my book. Five minutes later, I reached over to my backpack to grab something out of the top compartment, and I noticed an empty space. And in that empty space should have been my brand new 12 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel xsi camera. My heart sank, as it suddenly occurred to me what had just taken place. I shot up out of my seat, searching in vain all around me for what I knew was now in some stranger’s possession.
A train employee was emptying a trash bin nearby. She didn’t speak any English, so I put on a performance of which any world-class mime would be envious, describing the theft that had just taken place. Her expression turned to a mixture of sympathy and franticness (matching mine) and for a few moments, we both just stood there uttering frustrated sounds such as “ehh”, “ummm” and “ahhhh”. Then she pointed to the other end of the train and said “con-duc-tor!”.
Worth a try, I thought. I flung my bag over my shoulder, and sprinted down the aisle, moving from car to car until I found a few conductors talking at the other end of the train. Again, not much English was spoken between the four of them, but I managed to get my point across, describing my camera, and the Overly Friendly Man who snatched it. To my pleasant surprise, the conductors sprang into action like a special police task force. Motioning for me to follow, they began to comb the upper and lower cabins of each train car, occasionally looking back at me to see if I recognized the perpetrator.
As we drew nearer to the other end of the train I was beginning to lose hope. Surely this man was an a camera snatching artist, as he managed to reach into my bag and grab a rather bulky camera case while I was just inches away. I envisioned that my camera was stashed discretely in some dark corner of the train, to be retrieved later when the thief was ready to make his get-away.
NOT SO! To my astonishment, I suddenly saw Overly Friendly Man surrounded by the conductors ahead of me, camera in hand! He turned it over quickly, and made several motions of innocence with his hands, explaining very unconvincingly how he had “just found it sitting there” on the other side of the train.
The conductor picked up a phone to arrange for the police to meet us at the next station, but the train stopped there only a minute later and no police were there waiting. Friendly man casually walked off, explaining how this was his stop, and he would love to stay around and chat about the camera that he of course did not steal, but he had to be getting home. The conductors tried in vain to verbally detain him, but were powerless to do anything else. So he got away.
In any case, the important thing is that I didn’t lose my camera or more importantly the 1,500 precious memories stored on it thus far. If I had discovered it missing any more than two minutes later, Friendly Man would have walked right off the train with it.
This was a good lesson to learn right before coming to Barcelona, which I have been hearing is the pick-pocketing capital of the world. I’m not about to adopt a “trust no one” attitude, but I will certainly exercise a bit more caution the next time an Overly Friendly Person develops a sudden and persistent interest in my travel itinerary.